Prospect Park 'Willing to Equally Share' OLTL Characters With GH: 'It's a Win-Win for the Actors'
Talk about your daytime drama.
A half a day after word got out that Michael Easton, Roger Howarth and Kristen Alderson would need to exit ABC’s General Hospital so that the characters of John, Todd and Starr could resume an existence on the to-be-relaunched One Life to Live, Prospect Park — the media company backing the Hulu/iTunes reboot of OLTL (as well as All My Children) — issued a statement shedding light on the unusual matter.
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To tee up their statement, Prospect Park explained that in 2011, the company “lent characters to General Hospital until shooting began for [OLTL] so that the characters could stay alive with the fans and also so that the actors could remain working.
“Everyone at ABC and on the production staff of General Hospital understood that this was a temporary arrangement until production started once again on One Life to Live,” Prospect Park said. With OLTL now inching towards production on new episodes, “Prospect Park needs to, once again, cast these characters,” meaning possibly with other actors.
Or… maybe not?
Prospect Park’s actual statement on where things stand is posted below. The closing lines indicate that, as hinted by ABC’s own statement from Friday morning, all involved parties may try to hammer out a wackadoodle deal that… I don’t know, has McBain fighting crime Tuesday/Thursday/every second Friday in Port Charles? (Does, like, Paul Anthony Stewart play Todd on One Life while Howarth keeps the L.A. shift?) This even though Prospect shelled out “millions of dollars” to secure dibs on the OLTL characters, especially those it deems “essential” to relaunching the serial.
“Prospect Park understands that General Hospital has featured Llanview transplants Michael Easton (John) and Kristen Alderson (Starr) among others while we arranged production of the new version of One Life to Live. These characters, who we own under our agreement, are obviously essential to our production efforts, and a large reason we licensed the program. We also understand that legions of General Hospital fans have grown to love these actors and characters in a short time. So even though we are paying ABC millions of dollars to license the shows, we have been, and continue to be willing to equally share the characters with General Hospital and ABC.
It’s a win-win for the actors, the shows and fans, who love all of the shows and storylines. We hope to work out these agreements with ABC and the actors.”
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